Ruohong Zhang

Xuhui Zhou, Hao Zhu, Leena Mathur et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Humans are social beings; we pursue social goals in our daily interactions, which is a crucial aspect of social intelligence. Yet, AI systems' abilities in this realm remain elusive. We present SOTOPIA, an open-ended environment to simulate complex social interactions between artificial agents and evaluate their social intelligence. In our environment, agents role-play and interact under a wide variety of scenarios; they coordinate, collaborate, exchange, and compete with each other to achieve complex social goals. We simulate the role-play interaction between LLM-based agents and humans within this task space and evaluate their performance with a holistic evaluation framework called SOTOPIA-Eval. With SOTOPIA, we find significant differences between these models in terms of their social intelligence, and we identify a subset of SOTOPIA scenarios, SOTOPIA-hard, that is generally challenging for all models. We find that on this subset, GPT-4 achieves a significantly lower goal completion rate than humans and struggles to exhibit social commonsense reasoning and strategic communication skills. These findings demonstrate SOTOPIA's promise as a general platform for research on evaluating and improving social intelligence in artificial agents.

Ruohong Zhang, Yau-Shian Wang, Yiming Yang et al. · cmu

Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) is the task of tagging each document with the relevant labels from a very large space of predefined categories. Recently, large pre-trained Transformer models have made significant performance improvements in XMTC, which typically use the embedding of the special CLS token to represent the entire document semantics as a global feature vector, and match it against candidate labels. However, we argue that such a global feature vector may not be sufficient to represent different granularity levels of semantics in the document, and that complementing it with the local word-level features could bring additional gains. Based on this insight, we propose an approach that combines both the local and global features produced by Transformer models to improve the prediction power of the classifier. Our experiments show that the proposed model either outperforms or is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Ruohong Zhang, Yau-Shian Wang, Yiming Yang · cmu

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot language understanding has garnered significant attention. However, employing LLMs for large-scale inference or domain-specific fine-tuning requires immense computational resources due to their substantial model size. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel method, namely GenCo, which leverages the strong generative power of LLMs to assist in training a smaller and more adaptable language model. In our method, an LLM plays an important role in the self-training loop of a smaller model in two important ways. Firstly, the LLM is used to augment each input instance with a variety of possible continuations, enriching its semantic context for better understanding. Secondly, it helps crafting additional high-quality training pairs, by rewriting input texts conditioned on predicted labels. This ensures the generated texts are highly relevant to the predicted labels, alleviating the prediction error during pseudo-labeling, while reducing the dependency on large volumes of unlabeled text. In our experiments, GenCo outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods when only limited ($<5\%$ of original) in-domain text data is available. Notably, our approach surpasses the performance of Alpaca-7B with human prompts, highlighting the potential of leveraging LLM for self-training.

Ruohong Zhang, Yau-Shian Wang, Yiming Yang et al. · cmu

Extreme Multi-label Text Classification (XMTC) has been a tough challenge in machine learning research and applications due to the sheer sizes of the label spaces and the severe data scarce problem associated with the long tail of rare labels in highly skewed distributions. This paper addresses the challenge of tail label prediction by proposing a novel approach, which combines the effectiveness of a trained bag-of-words (BoW) classifier in generating informative label descriptions under severe data scarce conditions, and the power of neural embedding based retrieval models in mapping input documents (as queries) to relevant label descriptions. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on XMTC benchmark datasets and significantly outperforms the best methods so far in the tail label prediction. We also provide a theoretical analysis for relating the BoW and neural models w.r.t. performance lower bound.

Ruohong Zhang, Luyu Gao, Chen Zheng et al. · cmu

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their great power in language generation, often encounter challenges when dealing with intricate and knowledge-demanding queries in specific domains. This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance LLMs by effectively extracting the relevant knowledge from domain-specific textual sources, and the adaptive training of a chatbot with domain-specific inquiries. Our two-step approach starts from training a knowledge miner, namely LLMiner, which autonomously extracts Question-Answer pairs from relevant documents through a chain-of-thought reasoning process. Subsequently, we blend the mined QA pairs with a conversational dataset to fine-tune the LLM as a chatbot, thereby enriching its domain-specific expertise and conversational capabilities. We also developed a new evaluation benchmark which comprises four domain-specific text corpora and associated human-crafted QA pairs for testing. Our model shows remarkable performance improvement over generally aligned LLM and surpasses domain-adapted models directly fine-tuned on domain corpus. In particular, LLMiner achieves this with minimal human intervention, requiring only 600 seed instances, thereby providing a pathway towards self-improvement of LLMs through model-synthesized training data.

Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun et al. · cmu

Preference modeling techniques, such as direct preference optimization (DPO), has shown effective in enhancing the generalization abilities of large language model (LLM). However, in tasks involving video instruction-following, providing informative feedback, especially for detecting hallucinations in generated responses, remains a significant challenge. Previous studies have explored using large large multimodal models (LMMs) as reward models to guide preference modeling, but their ability to accurately assess the factuality of generated responses compared to corresponding videos has not been conclusively established. This paper introduces a novel framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content, enabling language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. Our approach demonstrates robust alignment with OpenAI GPT-4V model's reward mechanism, which directly takes video frames as input. Furthermore, we show that applying this tailored reward through DPO significantly improves the performance of video LMMs on video QA tasks.

Ruohong Zhang, Bowen Zhang, Yanghao Li et al. · cmu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes lack robust CoT reasoning data, relying on datasets dominated by short annotations with minimal rationales. In this work, we show that training VLM on short answers does not generalize well to reasoning tasks that require more detailed responses. To address this, we propose a two-fold approach. First, we distill rationales from GPT-4o model to enrich the training data and fine-tune VLMs, boosting their CoT performance. Second, we apply reinforcement learning to further calibrate reasoning quality. Specifically, we construct positive (correct) and negative (incorrect) pairs of model-generated reasoning chains, by comparing their predictions with annotated short answers. Using this pairwise data, we apply the Direct Preference Optimization algorithm to refine the model's reasoning abilities. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in CoT reasoning on benchmark datasets and better generalization to direct answer prediction as well. This work emphasizes the importance of incorporating detailed rationales in training and leveraging reinforcement learning to strengthen the reasoning capabilities of VLMs.

Yau-Shian Wang, Ta-Chung Chi, Ruohong Zhang et al.

We present PESCO, a novel contrastive learning framework that substantially improves the performance of zero-shot text classification. We formulate text classification as a neural text matching problem where each document is treated as a query, and the system learns the mapping from each query to the relevant class labels by (1) adding prompts to enhance label matching, and (2) using retrieved labels to enrich the training set in a self-training loop of contrastive learning. PESCO achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark text classification datasets. On DBpedia, we achieve 98.5\% accuracy without any labeled data, which is close to the fully-supervised result. Extensive experiments and analyses show all the components of PESCO are necessary for improving the performance of zero-shot text classification.

Donghan Yu, Yiming Yang, Ruohong Zhang et al.

Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.

Ruohong Zhang, Yu Hao, Donghan Yu et al.

Change-point detection (CPD) aims to detect abrupt changes over time series data. Intuitively, effective CPD over multivariate time series should require explicit modeling of the dependencies across input variables. However, existing CPD methods either ignore the dependency structures entirely or rely on the (unrealistic) assumption that the correlation structures are static over time. In this paper, we propose a Correlation-aware Dynamics Model for CPD, which explicitly models the correlation structure and dynamics of variables by incorporating graph neural networks into an encoder-decoder framework. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the advantageous performance of the proposed model on CPD tasks over strong baselines, as well as its ability to classify the change-points as correlation changes or independent changes. Keywords: Multivariate Time Series, Change-point Detection, Graph Neural Networks

Donghan Yu, Ruohong Zhang, Zhengbao Jiang et al.

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have received increasing attention in the machine learning community for effectively leveraging both the content features of nodes and the linkage patterns across graphs in various applications. As real-world graphs are often incomplete and noisy, treating them as ground-truth information, which is a common practice in most GCNs, unavoidably leads to sub-optimal solutions. Existing efforts for addressing this problem either involve an over-parameterized model which is difficult to scale, or simply re-weight observed edges without dealing with the missing-edge issue. This paper proposes a novel framework called Graph-Revised Convolutional Network (GRCN), which avoids both extremes. Specifically, a GCN-based graph revision module is introduced for predicting missing edges and revising edge weights w.r.t. downstream tasks via joint optimization. A theoretical analysis reveals the connection between GRCN and previous work on multigraph belief propagation. Experiments on six benchmark datasets show that GRCN consistently outperforms strong baseline methods by a large margin, especially when the original graphs are severely incomplete or the labeled instances for model training are highly sparse.